My first St. Patrick’s Day pinch was in second grade. As I stared at the giant green “F” on my color wheel test, Greg Mutch snuck behind me, dug his grimy nails into the flesh of my underarm, and pulled like he was trying to peel the plastic off a container of ground beef. Unlike most plastic covers, I tore.
My teacher, hearing my cry, looked up and called out to Greg, “You really should explain why you’re doing it — that it’s festive.” And so began my miserable twenty-year history with St. Patrick’s Day.
On any other day, being red-green colorblind isn’t so bad. I avoid those colors if I can or find other ways to point out an ambiguously colored thing. It’s not like identifying colors comes down to life or death. Well, except for the two or three lights I accidentally ran when I first started driving. That came close to life or death.
But St. Patrick’s Day can be rough for us colorblind folks. All of a sudden not wearing green can get you pinched — or punched if someone’s reading fast and loose. Some years the pinching is light, but some years it’s heavy, so some years I just don’t leave the house. You never know if you’re going to bump into a group of drunken Gregs or not.
My first couple St. Patrick’s Days I made the mistake of trusting my own color logic. I assumed by working backwards from what I saw as red, I would end up with green. Yeah, that didn’t work. One guy looked me right in the eyes as he squeezed my cheek between his hairy fingers and told me he hated to do it too because he loved Kill Bill. I thought I’d purchased a lime green tracksuit.
Another year I ordered a shirt online. How much more of a guarantee can you get than product details declaring the shirt is “Olive Green?” Well, the retailer had either failed the color wheel test themselves or was out to get me because I still got pinched like a 90s kid visiting their meemaw. Apparently, it was such a subtle green that it was either indeterminable or culturally unacceptable. “I hope you learned your lesson,” one gal breathed on me before burping up some Guinness.
But that night I had an epiphany. If I wore something with a rainbow on it, I would be guaranteed to be wearing every single visible color, including every shade of green. Plus, the leprechauns who are to blame for this whole pinching thing love rainbows. I’d be so festive. I’d be untouchable. Unfortunately, I had no idea tie-dye shirts do not inherently include every color of the rainbow. My shift manager was happy to educate me between ticklish stabs at my belly.
I pretty much gave up on St. Patrick’s Day at that point. I started ordering in my corned beef and bought a bulk-size of green food dye for the years to come. But as I looked out my window last year at the crowds tripping through the rain to stuff themselves into a pub, I spied a lone Irish flag bobbing triumphantly up the street. And with a surging patriotism for a country that is not my own, I laid out a plan.
And that plan left nothing to chance. I ordered an Irish flag shirt from the Celtic Thunder themselves. I bought out an entire St. Patrick’s day section of a Dollar Tree. I commissioned pants made exclusively out of clovers grown on Irish soil. Then I paid a research firm to run a quantitative in-person study and verify that every item I planned to wear was perceived as green by at least 95.7% of participants. I rented out a green screen stage and editing room and made sure that in post my body vanished with the set. I tracked down Greg Mutch and demanded he review my outfit.
And after a year of prep, St. Patrick’s Day arrived. I donned my thoroughly vetted clothes and danced through the day: sharing nods with presumably emerald-clad passerby, bashfully accepting compliments on my outfit, posing for a picture with someone’s grandmother. As I tripped onto the train at the end of the night, I couldn’t help but grin. I really felt lucky.
Then someone pinched me.
“Hey!” I recoiled, “I’m wearing green.”
“Oh, my bad,” the man replied, “I’m colorblind.”